Good riddance to this predator

We learned recently that NBC-TV has killed off that "To Catch a Predator" TV show.

Good riddance.

I hate child molesters as much as the next guy and perhaps even more considering that I once did what is perhaps the definitive article on NAMBLA, the North American Man-Boy Love Association.

But there was something particularly odious about the way in which NBC's Chris Hanson set himself up as an arm of law enforcement, all the while pretending to retain his journalistic objectivity.

I did a column on this last summer after one of my evening runs on the beach was interrupted by the presence of a TV crew and the blow-dried Hanson posing on the dunes.

Here's that column, which was headlined "Predator's Victim is Journalistic Ethics"

You may recall articles in this newspaper just before July 4 about New Jersey residents who were driving to Pennsylvania to bring back fireworks that are illegal in this state.

Now imagine that I was looking for an idea for a column and I came up with this scheme: I would e-mail one of my readers and tell him that, just for fun, the two of us should drive over the state line to buy fireworks. I would then arrange for the police to arrest him the minute he crossed the Delaware River. And I'd have a photographer record the whole thing.
You'd probably think I was highly unethical.

Sort of like Chris Hanson.

I had never heard the name "Chris Hanson" until one evening last week. I was running on the beach in Mantoloking with my dog Betty when I came upon what looked like a movie set.

As I got closer, I saw that the lights and cameras were pointed at one of those amazing heads of hair that signals a television personality.

It was Hanson. An onlooker told me that he was shooting a scene from the NBC program "To Catch a Predator." A bunch of Internet sex deviates had been lured to a house there in hopes of having sex with an underage girl.

Great, I thought. Just what Ocean County needs: More perverted idiots from up north.
I didn't catch the first airing of the show, but one of my neighbors gave me a summary.

"I've never seen such a pathetic bunch of losers in my life," he said.

He was talking about the alleged molesters, but he could have been talking about the characters at NBC who thought up this show. One of the key tenets of journalistic ethics is separation between the media and the government. If the government wants to chase down child molesters, good for the government. The more it catches, the better.

But the role of the media is to report on the arrests, not facilitate them.

"It's a creepy way to get ratings," said Fred Brown, who is on the ethics board of the Society of Professional Journalists. "This is the classic end-justifies-the-means argument, but the means are pretty damn far over the edge if you ask me."

The edge in question involves the difference between reporting events and instigating them, which journalists are not supposed to do. The people at NBC recognize this rule of ethics, but they claim they are not violating it. NBC spokesperson Jenny Tartikoff maintains that it is not the network that is initiating the sting but the watchdog group Perverted Justice, a volunteer group that makes contact with the wannabe perverts online. To hear Tartikoff tell it, all NBC does is record the result:

"Perverted Justice personnel coordinate their activities with law enforcement authorities," she wrote in an e-mail. "Dateline's involvement with law enforcement primarily involves reporting on the activities of law enforcement."

Sounds good, but in fact Perverted Justice is paid by NBC to set up the stings, about $75,000 an episode. And that was unethical enough that producer Marsha Bartel refused to do the show. She was later fired and is suing NBC for $1 million.

Her lawyer, Roger Simmons, said Bartel refused to do the show because "NBC was trying to step her into the role of quasi-drama as opposed to news reporting."

And "Dateline NBC" is violating all the rules of news reporting. Reporters aren't supposed to assume false identities and make false statements to get a story. Yet NBC is paying people to do just that.

Even the theoretically noble goal of getting these potential perverts locked up could be tainted, Simmons told me. He said he suspects NBC is cooperating with the cops mainly to avoid getting sued. Once these guys are hit with criminal charges, they are less likely to file a civil action against the network, Simmons said.

But from an ethical standpoint, it would be better if the TV guys stuck to TV. They could simply videotape the encounters and then let the police decide after the fact how to handle the prosecution.

Instead, the network gives a live video feed to law enforcement, said Simmons. But that didn't prevent the network from getting at least 20 subpoenas in the resultant criminal cases, he said. This is another entanglement that journalists try to avoid, said Greg Leslie of the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press.

"If you're subpoenaed, you lose the ability to argue you're acting independent of law enforcement," said Leslie. That independence is essential to the process of news gathering.

If you doubt that, please let me know. I'll invite you to go buy some fireworks in Pennsylvania next July. Maybe we'll just come back to Jersey, drink some beer and set them off in my backyard.